What Comes To Pass

The true targets

It's been noted already but I feel the urge to write about the targets of the bombings and how it all stacks up for me.

When the news filtered through there was one thing I couldn't understand. Why the hell did they bomb Aldgate?

My University's in Aldgate and not a lot else is. Sure there's St Mary's Axe but you can get there just as fast if not faster from Liverpool Street Station itself. Aldgate is just about where central London meets the slightly dodgier areas of the east end. The station is never packed, even at rush hour (and I know having had late lectures or library periods). The Circle line can get a bit full but it's hardly sardines-time.

Heck if I wanted to kill as many people and cause as much damage as was humanly possible I know exactly where I'd have bombed. The terrorists didn't draw this plan on the back of a beer coaster, they would have planned meticulously (as can be seen in the use of the 1-2 Tube/Bus strike, reminiscent of attacks in Israel). They'd have reached the same conclusion, it's the one that any Londoner would reach.

The Central Line.

Back in the day, the MTR was fundamentally the same as the District Line's infrastructure is today, many people living in Hong Kong won't remember the old MTR carriages but they were identical in all but seating arrangements to the ones still used by the District Line. However, unlike their London-based brothers, the carriages in Hong Kong reached such a level of passenger-saturation that one literally could not breathe, I was fortunate to be a small child at the time of all this and was far more interested in growing the extra foot or so I needed to be able to finally reach those inviting hand-grips that dangled from the ceiling, than in negotiating an extra inch or so of breathing space.

The point is that I had never been in a crush so palpably asphyxiating as the old MTR at rush hour until I got onto the Central Line during the morning commute. If you are courteous and let other people onto the train first before you, you had better hope that you're not the same height as me, because when the doors shut, I literally had to curve my neck down to my chest to fit into the arching carriage. My cheek was more more or less resting on top of the woman's head in front of me.

If I wanted to kill as many westerners as possible I'd have detonated or planted my device on one of those trains. It's a no brainer.

Not only would the shockwave be able to kill far more people by virtue of their tight-packing (indeed after the blast you'd have probably lost half a dozen more commuters to a "Hillsborough Disaster" effect as people panicked trying to escape) but the tunnels of the central line are compact and tight, unlike the relatively airy ones that house the Circle line, so the blast would have had much less opportunity to dissipate and would have resulted in more devastation.

The Piccadilly line was bombed which shows exactly what I'm talking about, by far the most devastating blast and probably accentuated by the nature of the carriage and passenger density (the Piccadilly line uses the same carriages as the Northern and Central line).

But the terrorists chose Aldgate, not only that but they also chose Edgeware Road. For anyone who hasn't an understanding of Islamism's conflict with moderate Islam this is a puzzler.

Edgeware Road is the undisputed centre of Islam in Europe today. It houses the foremost scholars in centres of scriptural interpretation, it has a multitude of important Mosques and is basically the Mecca of Europe. If I were a white supremacist Nazi knuckle-dragger who wanted to kill as many Muslims as I could that's where I'd head with my high-powered rifle.

Bombing outside the Edgeware Road station is likely to kill the highest concentration of Muslims possible and that's exactly the intended effect of the bomb. Not only would it be a joke to say that this was anything other than the express intention of the terrorists as they clearly spent months planning this escapade but even if it wasn't, there are dozens of stops on the London Underground, just in Zone 1 there are far more tempting targets.

The bombs were set to kill as many moderate Muslims as humanly possible, they couldn't honestly have been better placed. Islamism seeks the re-establishment of the Caliphate and that doesn't just mean the subjugation of all Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus to the 'will of Allah' but also of those Muslims who aren't-Muslim-enough for the tastes of the Islamists.

The bombings were intended to send a message to these Muslims who live in our free society that their reforms must end, that there is only one true interpretation of the Koran, and it clearly states that the kuffar should be cleansed and that the abrogated religions be stomped. Women must remain under heel and homosexuals be put to the death.

There is simply no other way to explain the targeting of the bombs. Not if you're a Londoner, not if you've travelled the tube every day and not if you've spent your afternoons in Aldgate and the London Metropolitan Student Union Pub (which is, despite its best intentions, a dive btw).

Later

John